Guerndale; an old story

Front matter

^ GIJERNDALE

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE

SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND

Preface

IN these latter commercial days of ours, when a rise of one-eighth of one per centum in the rate of discount causes more stir than was anciently felt at the downfall of a religion, and even our passions are regulated by the laws of supply and demand ; in these days, when the strength of popular emotion is accurately tested in the stock market and not often felt in any other way ; in these days, when honor is replaced by adroitness, justice by good nature, and the occasional highwayman by the common swindler — in all these days it is natural that the character of our fiction should follow the nature of our thought. These are the piping times of peace : we lazily adapt ourselves to the laws of expediency, and are possessed of too much good taste to be either very good or very bad. So we all preserve a specious mediocrity •, and society is somewhat insipid in consequence. Sometimes, still, we long for the heavy villain of our forefathers ; for a little shadow, to lend a more strikvi PREFACE.

ing contrast to the unquestionable valor of our sons and the indisputable virtue of our daughters. The modern novel has replaced the mediaeval romance, snubs are dealt instead of stabs ; the chanson d^ amour has become vers de societe, and every young lady is quite competent to be her own duenna ; maidens are mistresses of etiquette, and our bloods and blades, our lions, roar you an 't were any sucking-dove.

Is it then that passions fade in the garish light of civilization ? Was romance the outgrowth of barbarism, and earnestness of intolerance ? Is the exaggeration of an emotion, of a virtue, in equally bad taste with the exaggeration of a manner or voice ? Has poetry fled, and left us in a desert of common sense ? In answer to some of these questions, I have committed this history to writing. Should it seem to the reader exaggerated, improbable, let him remember that we are all now too polite to bring our real lives upon the stage of society ; and let him not forget that real lives may yet exist. Every nature is stretched upon the Procrustean bed of convention. Romeo no longer prates of his love at the street corners, nor does Othello use the fatal frankness of a pillow ; Tarquin studies propriety, and Achilles dissembles his wrath. So in our tragedies : we no longer kill half the company openly and above board in the fourth act. Nee Medea trucidet liberos coram populo: the evident deed has given place to the complex emotion ; the objective to the subjective. We

PREFACE. vii

must seek the romantic in thought, not event ; in character, not action ; in our real selves, not the selves men take with them to the club. And I sometimes fancy that when we do this, we find as much romance in the world as ever.

Now, when I had finished this story, I threw it over to a friend of mine, a literary and artistic fellow, who is mentioned frequently in these pages. I am nothing but a plain civil engineer ; and am wont to rely upon his judgment in these matters, as he himself is on the dilettante lay. This, I am told, is an Italian word, meaning " one who likes ; " and my friend is a dilettante ; which I take to be a fellow who does nothing himself and dislikes everything anybody else does.

Well, he brought the MS. back next day, and said, in his laziest and most critical manner, that what particularly struck him in the way I had told the story (with the details of which he also was familiar), was the caption I had chosen for the first chapter. " For," he said (being also a little on the musical lay), "you have carried out that idea in your workmanship ; and the metaphor of the melody or symphony (which I observe you cribbed from Schopenhauer), is not ill-chosen. Thus, applying it to Guy's history, in the first book you strike the key-note and give us an adagio. Then a scherzo, and an allegro affetuoso ; in the fourth book an andante ; and finally a presto, with recurrence to the theme and viii PREFACE.

key-note. Insensibly, your style has conformed to this idea, which I am not sure is a bad one. For a life is made up of a few movements, all bearing a certain relation to the key-note of character : the peaceful adagio of childhood, the allegro of youth, the presto of the Sturm und Drang period." At this point I shut him up ; but he insisted on my putting his idea in a preface.

Having apologized for the story, I suppose I ought now to apologize for this preface. I am aware that the custom of writing prefaces is old, and, like that of heading chapters with apposite quotations, a grave offence against modern taste. I am in the quandary of the Hindoo philosopher, who supported his world by an elephant, and the elephant by a tortoise ; and I see nothing for it but to follow the good old precedent, and leave the tortoise unsupported.

J. S., OF Dale.

Denver, March 31, 1881.

GUERNDALE.

Chapter I

" Now, just as the very essence of Man consists in this : that his Will strives, is satisfied, strives anew, and so on for ever : so the essence of melody consists in a continual departure from the key-note ; it wanders in a thousand ways, but always comes back to it at last"

ON one of those dreamy afternoons in August, when all audible life in the country drowses away to a faint murmur, and we float through the day as the shifting clouds drift across the sky, you could scarce do better than saunter into the old churchyard at Dale. There is an indefinable charm about our New England graveyards which is often lacking in more pretentious cemeteries. There is little gleaming marble and heavy stonework ; and the greater part of the rude slate slabs is just sufficiently moss-grown to deaden the sound of the dropping nuts. The signs of recent bereavement are few ; most of the stones are softened and stained I into harmony with the sap-stained pines about them. The quiet tenants of the place seem rather spell-bound than dead ; and the sunset air breathes softly about the old carven letters, as if wooing the dead to forget that they had ever lived. Life seems so old a story, and so long, so very long, ago. And even in the first rich bloom of autumn, just when the fruit of the labored year is most perfect, nature seems to have an occasional day of hush and pause, as if debating whether it were worth while to go through the old story of winter, spring and summer once more. None are more sad than these days, when the earth, in all the flush of accomplished labor, sighs. It is like the sadness of a man at the crown of his ambition ; of a bride in her honeymoon.

Dale is an old Massachusetts village, lying nearly lost, far up among the Berkshire hills ; and such a day as this was wearing away the letters on the churchyard stones, many years ago ; and some such fancies as these were drifting through the mind of a boy, lying by the bole of a tall hemlock, and looking dreamily from under his long lashes at an old, slate gravestone. Had you come upon him suddenly, you would have started at seeing him, so intensely still he lay ; as one starts at a squirrel, motionless, just before it flashes along the wall and vanishes. Even his eyes, deep and dark as they were, seemed rather to absorb light than to give it out. Otherwise, an ordinary-looking boy enough, except for a vague expression of sadness, which, after a moment's study, seemed not so much an ex pression as an hereditary cast of feature. He had been reading, with some difficulty, part of "the old inscription on the slate before him :

and, in a curious, half-boyish, half-mature way, was thinking about it. From the part of the epitaph that was yet legible, it seemed a matter of some doubt to which of two possible places the departed spirit had gone. And yet the nature of the stone was clearly intended to be laudatory ; carven thereon was the rude semblance of a weeping willow, shading an urn of classic shape, while a bat-like cherub surmounted the name :

He wondered whether Mistresse Anne Dyar knew she was dead, and if she were aware of the ambiguity of her epitaph. Or perhaps the unknown rhymer really thought that the windows of heaven commanded, as an advertisement would say, a fine view of hell.

All this rather carelessly ; for hell had long since ceased to be a very tangible fact, even in the year of grace 1858, and in the mind of an impressionable boy. To be sure he had heard old Dr. Grimstone lay down the precise location of hell, and then enter, with appalling realism, into a detailed description of the ground-plan thereof. He had even taken, as in. tended for personal application, the reverend Doctor's denunciation of children of sin and creatures of Satan, and had slunk home considerably abashed in consequence. But when the Doctor, between churches, came to his mother's house for dinner — which occasionally happened, for his father had been a clergyman — and laughed very heartily at his own jokes, besides calling him "Sonny" and giving him a quarter, he began to fancy that the good old Doctor's eloquence depended very much upon scenic effect, and that the Devil was not such a very terrible personage in private life after all. He knew that most of the people in Dale, if asked directly as to their belief in the localities aforementioned, would have answered unhesitatingly in the affirmative ; but was not this from motives of propitiation and a prudent regard for possibilities ? Did people really care as much, hope as much, fear as much as they pretended ? It was very pleasant lying half buried in the long churchyard grass that afternoon. Life was rather an easy, simple thing, and all about him seemed to suggest a sort of grave amusement at people's making such a to-do about it.

Suddenly the boy started up upon his elbow. His whole appearance and attitude changed ; he no longer seemed part of the hour and the place, but a truant school-boy who had strayed thither by mistake. His eyes sparkled with fun as he ran rapidly across to the high stone wall which skirted the dusty country road. Soon after, the prattle of a girlish voice was heard. The boy crouched for a spring over the wall and a merry surprise, but drew back suddenly into the shade, as he heard a strange voice pronounce his name.

" Guyon Guerndale — who is he ? "

" Oh ! " said the girl, " don't you know ? " And as the two little figures pattered away, Guyon heard the beginning of a long explanation. But he still remained in the shadow of the wall, as if surprised or shy ; and, as the two children disappeared among the willows at the bend of the road, he turned and wandered slowly home, keeping by the meadows at the base of the churchyard.

Chapter II

IN the days when the hilt of a sword better fitted a gentleman's hand than the quill of a pen, and when the owner of the sword was probably simple enough to take more pride in his well-shaped leg than in his clerkship — in short, in the year sixteen hundred and eighty-eight, there lived in the county palatine of Durham an old cavalier and baronet, Sir Godfrey Guerndale. A right stout arm and a right true heart had Sir Godfrey, and made bold to believe in God and the king. Devoted to the house of Stuart, he followed its fortunes to the bitter end, though its fortunes were but misfortunes, and the end his ruin. While he saw and deplored the cowardice, irresolution, and misgovernment which worked the downfall of that dynasty, he could not see why, if James Stuart was a coward, Godfrey Guerndale should be a traitor. So he was ever ready with his counsel and his sword ; and the one was despised and disregarded, while the other was used and thrown away. Finally, the battle of the Boyne was followed by ignominious flight and abandonment of the cause he thought righteous, and Sir Godfrey was in disfavor for the same loyalty and devotion his rightful lord had so little prized. Flis lands encumbered, his fortune wasted, his very plate melted down, he found himself, in the prime of life, without a cause and without a king. Disgusted, once for all, with the unworthy Stuarts, he refused to take part in the numerous Jacobite intrigues which even then were forming ; unwilling to accept as final the results of a half-fought contest, he disdained to seek favor at the hands of one whom he considered an usurper. Like many another loyal gentleman, taking with him what remained to him of fortune and of faith, he sought refuge and retirement in the new world. His wife, a French lady of the Court of Louis XIV. — one of the noble family of La Roche Guyon — -refused to accompany him, and saved him the trouble of compulsion by leaving him for an old friend, an ancient companion of the Merry Monarch. Remaining about the Court of St. Germain only so long as was necessary to run his sword through this gentleman. Sir Godfrey departed for America. His only son, then a youth of fourteen, accompanied him — more by his father's will than his own inclination ; for Guy was a precocious boy, and even at that early age considered his father a fool. There also went with him an old and valued servant, John Simmons by name, who passed the rigors of the long voyage in drinking strong liquor and cursing Dutch William and his master's French wife.

All this did not tend to give Sir Godfrey a taste for New England society, which consisted chiefly of Puritans, who would, in the words of Sir John Denham, "*quarrel with mince-pies and disparage theii best and dearest friend, plum-porridge ; fat pig and goose itself oppose, and blaspheme custard through the nose." Sir Godfrey was fairly disposed toward these people, and presumed, as he intended not to trouble them, they would do, or rather leave undone, as much for him. Having acquired by purchase from the Indians a large tract of land in what was then a wilderness, Sir Godfrey lived the retired life of a studious country gentleman, and waited and watched for the birth of a Stuart worthy to be restored.

But that event never came. The old baronet lived long enough to give the name of Guerndale to the settlement springing up about him, and died, as he had lived, a disappointed man, soured by the treason of his friend, the falseness of his wife, and the unworthiness of his king. He was not much known, and perhaps as much feared as respected among the simple and bigoted Puritans of the neighborhood. His quiet memory soon faded away, and what little is now known of him is due chiefly to the researches of genealogists and antiquarians. In the early collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society there is some mention of him, and I think Jones mentions the Guerndales as among the Tories of the American Revolution. All the early traditions of the family, however, cluster about his son, " Bad Sir Guy," a sobriquet first awarded him after his death. His reputation, being positively evil, soon obscured that of his father, which was negatively good. He failed utterly to understand Sir Godfrey's Quixotic devotion to an idea, and his sole desire was to rettirn to that country from which he regarded himself as unjustly exiled ; and not to the Court of St. Germain, out of power, but to the Court of St. James. But he no more wished to return as a needy supplicant of royal favor than as the blind adherent of a lost cause. He meant to regain that position which his father had cast away so foolishly; to shine again among the gallants of the Court ; to be once more lord of those broad demesne lands in Durham, held by the little onerous service of guarding the bones of St. Cuthbert from the devil. For Guyon did not fear the devil, and did not think this would be difficult.

Still, to accomplish all these things, money was necessary ; and money he would have. He must return in a manner befitting his rank and station. He was not a miser ; he did not desire gold for its own sake, but as a means to an end. But that means was indispensable ; and he must get it all costs. His father's attachment to the king was loyalty ; his own was measured by self-interest. He became a tool of young John Churchill, and afterward a soldier under Queen Anne, thereby mortally offending his father. It were an endless task to mention the numerous blots on his reputation. Thirty years ago his memory was yet alive in Dale. If we are to believe the old gossips, pillage, piracy, and treason were among the least of his crimes.

He soon disappeared from the army, leaving an evil odor behind him ; and it was hoped he was dead, until, after his father's death, he turned up at Guerndale with a young and beautiful wife.

JO GUERNDALE.

Old Solomon Bung, the village story-teller, always accompanied this part of the story with a knowing shake of the head and the fragmentary phrase, " But they do say . . . ." Whatever they do or did say, the memory of this poor girl is the one bright edge to the story, for she loved her evil lord devotedly ; and with her sad, but winning smile, she soon became a universal favorite, particularly among the poor, or that class which most nearly approached the poor in those days of rustic plenty. Even wicked Sir Guyon seemed the better for her ; and all might in the end have been well, had it not been for the catastrophe which brought the name of Guerndale into lasting notoriety.

Old John Simmons had faithfully aided his master. Sir Godfrey, in the labor and troubles which attended his settlement in New England. When the mansion-house was built, he settled contentedly down in one corner of it with his pretty little Puritan wife, who acted as housekeeper for them all. If we may trust old stories, one of their sons, Philip, was by no means a comfort to his father and mother in their declining years. Living some distance from the nearest settlements, he was not imbued with the spirit of the honest people of the neighborhood, but became a proteg6 and a pupil of the many roving Indians who yet lingered about the place. To succeed his father in the servile position he seemed to Philip to occupy, soon became distasteful to him ; and when old John died, an event which happened about the time of Sir Godfrey's death, Philip took his father's hard-earned savings, and his own pick-

GUEKNDALE. 11

ings and stealings, and bought a parcel of freehold land adjoining the Guerndale estate. Here Sir Guyon found him on his return, married, and living the life more of a hunter or scout than a farmer. In him he recognized a kindred spirit, and soon revealed to him his schemes for obtaining that wealth which Guyon so eagerly desired.

The real resources of New England were then but little known. Projects which now would be attributed to the visions of a madman, were then soberly undertaken, and regarded as prompted by a laudable spirit of exploration. The old myth of El Dorado had not quite disappeared from the minds of the settlers ; nor had they yet realized that the true wealth of New England lay rather on the surface of her soil and in the depths of her seas, than in the veins of her barren rocks. Misled, like many a better man, by the glitter of a valueless mineral, Guyon passed his time in delving at the base of the rugged hills which lay behind his house. At his directions, a rude smelting-furnace was erected ; and respect for his elder's experience and determination soon brought Philip Simmons, insensibly, to the same position of dependence and servitude which, in his father, he had despised. Again, though in a less laudable pursuit, a Simmons was the faithful servant of a Guerndale. No one else was admitted to their labors ; secretly, so far as they could, the two mined and smelted ; but in vain. Yet people were curious ; and doubtless many an eye had watched the halfswaggering, half-servile demeanor of Philip, and the grim, eager face of Sir Guyon, when the features of both were stamped with the same greed, as they turned over rock and sand, or cowered silently at night over the red furnace-fire.

One night, from farm to farm ran the report that Simmons had been murdered. A boy had been out hunting that afternoon, and had lost himself at dusk among the hills. Tradition says that it was a misty, rainy day in November, and little was to be seen in the hills save the sombre outlines of the nearest pineforest, and the varying shades of blackness in the mist that marked the height of the trees. So the boy had easily become confused as to the way, and it was with unusual gladness that he saw bleared in the mist the red glow of the furnace-fiire. Made bolder than usual by the inclemency of the weather — for even then the forge was regarded among the common fol'k as a place at most times to be avoided — he hurried on toward the door, but stopped on hearing the sounds of an angry altercation within. Catching, amid the curses, the words "diamond," "halves," "my fair share," he rushed to the little square window. Over it was stretched a sheet of isinglass ; and through this he got a distorted view of the interior. At one corner stood Guyon Guerndale, his face pale with rage, his left hand clutching a diamond which the boy said afterward was as large as a pigeon's-egg. Opposite stood Philip Simmons, his back against the door.

" Bah, fool ! let me pass ? " hissed Guerndale. And Guerndale made as if he would pass through the door, which Simmons still held. " Pshaw, Simmons ! be a faithful -.ervant, as your father was before, and trust to me for your reward ! I may make you a gentleman yet — who knows ? " Simmons, with a curse, threw himself upon his master, striking him with a clenched fist upon the lip. At this a great flood of scarlet swept over Sir Guyon's pale cheek ; he drew his sword from the scabbard he had buckled over his working-dress, and struck Simmons to the ground. Striking him twice again, he dashed the lantern to the floor and strode out of the cabin.

All this time the diamond was flashing in his left hand, and the boy believed him to have taken it with him. Rooted to the spot with fear, he could do nothing, but heard Guerndale's heavy tread down the bed of the brook which formed the only path out of the valle3^ Presently the cabin took fire from the lantern, and by its first flames the boy saw Philip Simmons still lying on his back, with a wide gash beneath his upturned chin. He turned, and fled to the village.

A party was at once made up to proceed to the smelting-furnace ; the cabin was found in ashes, among which was the body of a man. A hue and cry was raised for the murderer. Guerndale, not expecting so speedy a pursuit, was found in his own house, calmly making preparations for flight. At first he seemed not to suppose that the villagers would dare to apprehend him. Brought to bay, he showed fight ; and, anxious as they were to take him alive, he was killed by his own shot, after he had cut and slashed a dozen of his pursuers.

That night his lady died, leaving behind her a boy, destined to be sole heir to the Guerndale estate. Not a very large principality, you will say, for all that the king's escheator cared to trouble himself about was forfeit to the crown. Hard indeed would have been the boy's lot, had not some yeomen, well-to-do, who owed their all to early kindnesses of his mother, taken and cared for the poor little creature, who already seemed unfortunate in being born alive.

Meanwhile, Sir Guyon Guerndale had been buried, after the good old fashion, at the meeting of foui roads, with a stake through his heart.

CHAPTER III. *' All men are bom free and equal." — Old Son^*

TIME went on, change succeeded change, fortunes were made and lost, families were founded and dispersed, the little settlement of Guerndale grew slowly into a country town, and yet no change came in the fortunes of the family that gave the place its name. It ever seemed that they lived only in the past, and had their hopes buried with their fortunes, at that fatal date in the early part of the eighteenth century. To be sure, the square old country-house was left them; but land, wealth, and position were gone. The disgrace of the family remained, and stamped itself upon the nature of the descendants of Guyon the murderer. From father to son they lived a life of dreams ; absorbed in books and contemplation, that strain of ambition and action, which had been so evilly used, seemed to be ended and buried with its last possessor. His son, who came into the world at that dark moment, struck the key-note of the lonely, introspective nature which remained dominant in the lives of his descendants. Each in turn wrung from the soil the scanty subsistence he required, married in due time, without love, and died in course, leaving, at most, two sons to perpetuate the misfortunes of their race. Family pride they had, but this served rather as a motive for holding aloof and brooding on the past, than for taking part in the stirring events of their day. In the Revolution they were Tories, but took no active part, and were easily overlooked in the confiscation which followed. In brief, they all seemed born under a cloud; each felt it his duty to marry, and usually married beneath his station. Unknown among the later aristocracy growing up in New England, they refused to face the trials and rebuffs which they would unavoidably meet if they emerged from their traditional retirement.

Curiously enough, no one had ever seen the diamond since that dark November evening, but it was believed the fatal jewel was yet retained in the family of Guerndale. This added not a little to the distrust with which the possessors of the stone were regarded. Keeping the object of the crime seemed, as it were, a ratification of the crime itself. Yet the family never would part with the jewel; and years ago, I remember, it was believed by the older people of the town that fortune would never come back to the Guerndales until they lost or threw away the ill-won heirloom — a common tradition enough in cases of this sort.

So time passed, and brought neither happiness to the family of Guerndale, nor kindlier feelings toward them on the part of the neighbors.

Meanwhile, the nature of the place changed with the nature of the country. The Revolution came and went, leaving a slight accession to the ill-repute in which the family were held. The town of Guamdale became the centre of an important farming district. Then a few manufacturing establishments sprang up along the brown little river. Social distinctions were levelled ; aristocratic ideas gave place to democratic dogmas ; the township, from an oligarchy, became what my friend Randolph used to call a demagogue-archy. Even the old Guerndale murder became a thing of the past — as obsolete as an old English tragedy by the side of Camilla or Frou-frou. Only the impalpable feeling of the towns-people toward the Guerndales remained. A slight odor of disfavor still hung about them, as the scent of oil still lingers about the rotten Nantucket wharves. Any old-country feeling of respect for the founders of the town must have disappeared early in the present century. Many people were now there, more wealthy and influential, who could claim to be what is in New England considered of " good family.'' Several names had appeared, with due iteration, every thirty years or so in the Harvard triennial catalogue, where you might in vain have looked among the fellows and graduates for a Guerndale. Several families had acquired wealth and position in Nevi? York or Boston, and left a glory behind them in the little town of their nativity, or returned to grace their ancestral acres with pretentious modern mansions.

The Simmonses, for instance — they had lived many years on their farm, quite as long as the Guerndales ; and a scion of that stock had made an enormous fortune by introducing salt fish into South America. He had come back to Guerndale, and had been well known as the richest man of the place ; and the prominent Boston family of Symonds are his descendants. This Simmons or Symonds (who built the Symonds Memorial Hall, at Harvard) was very active in changing that town-name which had ever been felt by the more progressive citizens as servile and un-American. Who were these Guerndales, that they should inflict their name, and their disgrace with it, upon an American township, as if it were their property ? They owned less land than half the farmers about, and every one knew they had not a cent to bless themselves with. So argued Squire Simmons, and, thought his fellow-citizens, argued well. But then came the question of change. Here opinions were more conflicting. Some favored Ephesus, some Arcadia, some New Moscow, others Anemonevale. Squire Simmons argued liccretly, but long and earnestly, in favor of Simmonsville ; indeed, it was said that he offered to build a townclock and a wooden steeple in the latest stj le, upon the old stone town-hall, if they would adopt that name. But to this proposal there was much quiet opposition, in spite of a flaming leader in the Guerndale Weekly Palimpsest, calling attention to the " unprecedented munificence latent in the generous proposition of one of our townsmen, that true gentleman, whom we feel it an honor to call our fellow-citizen, Joseph Simmons, Esq." Strange to say, among the old farmers there was found some reluctance to naving the name changed at all ; conduct which was characterized by those citizens who, having before lived in other places where things were done much